Marketo Buys Crowd Factory, Silverpop Buys CoreMotives, and Other News from Pardot, Neolane, Act-On and OfficeAutoPilot

With its usual fanfare, Marketo today announced the acquisition of social marketing campaign company Crowd Factory. Crowd Factory is a certified cool product, which is probably reason enough for Marketo to buy them.  But what I find intriguing is how little the two businesses overlap.  Marketo is primarily focused on business marketing, and in particular lead generation, nurturing and analytics. Crowd Factory has some B2B clients but...

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B2B Email Benchmarks: Answers Vary Widely

One of the things I’m enjoying about my new role as head of analytics at Left Brain DGA is being closer to hands-on marketing than I was as a consultant. This leads to different questions than I used to get, including the ever-popular “what’s a reasonable response rate for our emails?” That one came up last week and led me to review my files on industry benchmarks. Without giving away any deep secrets, I thought I’d share the results.I found five...

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Infusionsoft Revamps Its Interface, Adds New Campaign Builder, Web Analytics and Lead Scoring

Infusionsoft introduced its latest release earlier this month. This included a full revamp of its customer interface, a new campaign builder and shopping cart, and new capabilities for Web analytics, lead scoring, and lead source reporting.Stated so plainly, this doesn’t sound like much. But Infusionsoft says it’s the biggest release in company history and I've no reason to doubt.  A new interface and campaign builder are big projects.Both...

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